Friday, November 08, 2013

ANN COULTER AND OUTLAW MIKE TALK HEALTHCARE.

"So now it turns out Obama knew that 93 million Americans would have their health insurance canceled the whole time he was claiming, "If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period."

Obama lied. Period. "Hope and Change" was actually "A Sucker Is Born Every Minute."

Even without the 2010 Health and Human Services (HHS) report admitting that 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance, anyone with half a brain (which is a pre-existing condition) knew that millions of Americans would be thrown off their insurance plans under Obamacare. Under the law, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is to determine what every health insurance plan must cover -- and any plans that don't are illegal.

As a result, gay guys are now going to be forced to buy plans that cover maternity care. Mormons will have to buy plans that cover gambling addiction therapy. Elderly couples can buy only insurance that includes pediatric dental care. Catholic hospitals will be required to provide birth control and abortions.

Our federal overseers, led by the arrogant and smug gender-feminist Sebelius, know what's best for us. (Which is so nice of her since, as she recently pointed out, she doesn't work for us.) Her idea of flexibility is not requiring Catholic priests to perform abortions. Not yet, anyway.

Obviously, health insurance premiums are going through the roof with all these federal mandates. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute reports that health insurance premiums will be higher than before Obamacare in at least 45 states -- an astronomical 256 percent higher in some cases. The Los Angeles Times says middle-income families in California will pay 30 percent more for health insurance, even with the subsidies.

Policies are being canceled because your old plan -- the one you shopped for and liked -- is now illegal. It doesn't cover Sandra Fluke's dental dams. Obama is blaming the insurance companies for discontinuing policies that he made illegal. (At least he isn't blaming the cancellations on a guy who put a movie trailer on the Internet this time.)

Isn't it your basic duty as a caring human being to buy an expensive health care plan you don't really want? Because who knows better about the health care needs of 310 million Americans than a smug gender-feminist? Certainly not you."

"The best we can hope for is that influence-peddlers and government bureaucrats make wise decisions about our health care, just as they did with Solyndra, Social Security, public education and the Amtrak food service. Oops! (Only the government could lose billions of dollars with a monopoly.) From the people who brought you the Postal Service ... here's Obamacare!

It's the homework requirement that is the most annoying aspect of Obamacare. Sure, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance and be forced to buy plans they don't want. And many, many millions will no longer be able to go to the doctor of their choosing -- or any doctor at all!

But we've also all been given homework -- mountains of reports, exchanges, insurance plans and mail to study. I'd prefer a 50 percent tax hike to this forced busy-work under Obamacare.

What if Americans don't want to spend weeks online figuring out their new insurance options? What if we don't want to provide the government with reams of personal information simply to be able to buy health insurance? What if we just want to pay our doctor directly for a yearly checkup? Why do we have to examine HHS regulations to find out how much that's going to cost us in fines and taxes?

Under Obamacare, every day is tax day.

And for what? Eighty-five percent of Americans were happy with their health care before Obamacare, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index -- higher than almost any other product or service polled, with even Amazon coming in at 88 percent satisfaction. Even uninsured Americans were as satisfied with their health care as Canadians were with their national health care.

Kausfiles assured us there would be no death panels or benefits cuts under Obamacare because the voters would rise up and punish politicians if they dared cut our benefits!

What about those of us who don't want to be in a constant state of agitation just to get the health care of our choice? Not everyone is better off in a world where the pushy win and the quiet and unassuming die because their rare diseases didn't attract a band of noisy lobbyists.

No group of government bureaucrats can substitute for hundreds of millions of Americans making individual choices about their own lives and their own health. It would be as if the government took it upon itself to tell us whom to marry. Only someone who went to Harvard would think central planners should do that.

The smart people in the Soviet Union tried to plan the nation's agriculture, and the result was 50 years of "bad weather." And they were dealing with inert objects -- land, seeds and crops.

They didn't have to consider whether the fertilizer was a teetotaler who didn't anticipate needing substance abuse therapy or a priest who preferred to skimp on marital counseling insurance.

Our central planners think they can direct something infinitely more complex than farmland: human beings and their individual health needs. Under Obamacare, the pushy and the connected win. Everyone else loses."

And if you don't like Ann Coulter, maybe you're more sympathetic to me, and it that cas you might want to listen to a few observations of mine:

The bipartisan CBO (Congressional Budget Office) predicts that even under Obamacare, the number of uninsured will never fall below 30 million. Check it out here. Now call me a callous monster, but in which respect does 30 million uninsured differ that much, relatively speaking with a pop. of 310 million, from the estimated CURRENT 49 million? And to what degree is the latter number really a reflection of the despised 'heartlessness' of the 'American system'? You will always have uninsured. How many of those 49 million uninsured are really incapable of buying a plan, and how many can, but simply haven't thought of doing so yet? Christ, ten years agoI myself DID NOT HAVE health care coverage!!! Because I was young and healthy and thought that it was something for when I got a little further on the slippery path to old geezerdom.

No honestly, right now almost 90 per cent of the about 255-260 million people with an insurance, or covered by it, are hunky dory with their insurance. That's about 230 million people.

Under Obamacare, not only will you STILL have about, say, two-thirds of the number of uninsured right now, PLUS the majority of those with an O-Care insurance not happy with it. 'What difference does it make'?

Long before Obamacare, the country that spent the most on healthcare, in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, WAS the US already. Take a look at this list e.g.:

According to OECD numbers, the US spent a whopping 8,233 US$ per capita in 2010, for a total of 17.6 per cent of GDP. That's breathtaking, especially when you compare it with, uh, my own Belgistan: 3,969 US$ which translates into 10.5 per cent of GDP.

And yet I'm VERRRY much pleased with our healthcare system, I'm living proof of it.

In other words, it's not a matter of not spending enough, as demonrats and international leftards want the whole world to believe (as a child I was spoonfed the notion that if in the US you fall seriously ill and you can't pay for a cure you are left to die in the gutter) as it is of getting more bang for the buck.

In my opinion, policymakers in the US, and by that I mean not only demonratic policymakers, should actually have taken a close look to how it is done here instead of coming up with an unworkable moloch that will make things only WORSE...

We don't have a scam like the UK's NHS. Our doctors and nurses are not state employees. Most of them work in hospitals and clinics that are VZW's - Verenigingen Zonder Winstoogmerk - or tax exempt entities. Sure, they do receive state funds to make ends meet but by and large the State, until now thank God, does not meddle in how our medical institutions organize their work. There's also state of the art private clinics thanks to the principle of competition. And somehow, somehow, our insurance premiums are fair. I pay around 720 EUR yearly for a plan that covers our family of four. How that is possible when premiums in the States are reportedly so much higher I don't know. Perhaps the staggering costs of litigation for alleged medical wrongdoing has something to do with it.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, looking closely at successful health care systems and modelling the US system after that would have been FAR MORE effective than coming up with a costly monstrosity that in the end will make things WORSE for basically everyone.